The Legacy of the Occupation
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Transcript of The Legacy of the Occupation
The Legacy of the Occupation
Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder
Representing the unrepresentable
‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’
Theodor Adorno
Structure of today’s lecture
• Vichy France and the Jews
• Reading Dora Bruder as social history
• Patrick Modiano
• Dora Bruder: Histoire/histoire
• Memory and Oblivion
• Places and Traces
• Making connections
The Jewish population in France
• History of the Jewish population in France
• Emancipation and Anti-Semitism
• The Dreyfus Affair
• C20th Immigration
• Russian pogroms
• World War I/Russian Revolution
• 1930s rise of Hitler
Vichy France and the Jews
• Vichy and Nazi legislation• 1940 ‘Statut des juifs’• 1941 Revised ‘Statut des juifs’• Registration and wearing of yellow star• Round-ups and movement restrictions• July 1942 rafle: Les Tourelles and Drancy camp• Statistics
Reading Dora Bruder as social history
• Origins of parents
• Registration of Jews
• Different ‘categories’ of Jews
• Exclusion of veterans
• Wearing of the yellow star
• Police round-ups (‘rafles’)
Patrick Modiano
• Born 1945• Father of Jewish
Italian origin• First novel: La Place
de l’étoile (1968)• Rue des boutiques
obscures (1978) Prix Goncourt
Dora Bruder: Histoire/histoire
• Fact, Fiction and Truth
Documents
• Newspaper advert• Birth register• School register• Registration of Jews• Police register• Letters to and from
camps• Deportation list to
Auschwitz
Fictional “sources”
• Victor Hugo, Les Misérables• Patrick Modiano, Voyage de
noces• Film: Premier Rendezvous• Fredo Lampe, Am Rande der
Nicht• Felix Hartlaub, ‘Notes et
impressions’• Roger Gilbert-Lecomte• Maurice Sachs• Jean Genet, Miracle de la
Rose
Fact and Fiction
And here is what disturbs me: at the end of their flight across a district whose topography and street-names have been invented by Victor Hugo, Cosette and Jean Valjean just manage to escape a police patrol by slipping behind a wall. […] This garden where the pair hide is that of a convent, which Victor Hugosituates precisely at no. 62 Rue de Petit-Picpus, the same address as that of the Convent of the Holy Heart of Mary where Dora was a boarder. (46-7;51-2)
Memory and Oblivion
• Memory and Forgetting
• Collaboration and Guilt
Traces and Places
• Ghosts on Parisian streets
• Changes between past and present
• “Zone militaire. Défense de filmer et de photographier”
Making connections…
• Structure of Dora Bruder
• ‘Coincidences’
• Identification of Modiano/narrator with Dora’s story
• Modiano’s running away/arrest
• Position of reader
D’hier à aujourd’hui
D'hier à aujourd'hui. Avec le recul des années, les perspectives se brouillent pour moi, les hivers se mêlent l'un à l'autre. Celui de 1965 et celui de 1942 . (8; 10)
La ville était déserte [le 19 septembre], comme pour marquer l’absence de Dora. Depuis, le Paris où j’ai tenté de retrouver sa trace est demeuré aussi désert et silencieux que ce jour-là. (137;144)